Leveling the playing field

"If you look for the bad in horses and other people, you're apt to find it, but if you look for the good in them, you're apt to find that instead. But you can't do that unless you also look for the good in yourself."

--John Baar

I went to a yoga class this summer while I was on vacation, and the teacher had us do a meditation on loving kindness. It started with visualizing someone you love. Then you direct that love toward yourself, then a stranger, then someone you're having difficulty with at the moment. I was completely stuck at the second step. I'd never even considered what a self that I could love might look like. I realized that generally I see myself as an amalgam of skills and talents that are in constant need of improvement, and I focus almost exclusively on the parts that need improving. Good lord! Was this also the way I see and treat my horse?

Right about this time I also started reading a book that a couple of friends had recommended. Titled The Introvert Advantage, it bills itself as an effort to level the playing field between introverts and extroverts. The author contends that, in a world where extroverts both out-number and out-speak introverts, it is their values that are considered the norm, and introverts internalize those values and consequently feel inferior when they don't live up to them.

I felt that I was pretty in touch and okay with my introvert nature, but I read the book anyway. And it was, I'll confess, really nice to have someone validating the way I often react to situations, even if I didn't feel that I needed the validation. The author discusses everything from the way that introverts have to budget energy to the way that their brains actually use a different neural route to process information, thereby making them slower but deeper thinkers. Most of all, though, she argues for all the important things that introverts bring to the table, including "the ability to focus deeply, a propensity for thinking outside the box, the strength to make unpopular decisions, and the potential to slow the world down a notch."

It was fascinating to study the physiological differences between extroverts and introverts, and I read the book with a lot of interest, too, because it discusses right-brain and left-brain types, so it has a lot of overlap with Parelli.

But it wasn't until a few weeks later that all this mushed around in my brain and changed something fundamental there. I realized that I'm always hard on myself not only because I focus on the skills I don't have, but because I give myself absolutely no credit for anything that comes easily to me.

Here's how I tend to operate: I find people I admire—people who have skills that I don't. I then compare myself to them, giving them full points for all of their skills, whether they are innate to them or not, and myself points only to the extent that I compare with this person. Now, because I'm only comparing myself to people I admire, and only comparing myself on their terms, who's going to come up short?

So, taking one particular friend that I admire as an example, if I were to assign actual points to the way that I'm subconsciously scoring things, here's how it would stack up:

My friend	Me
+1 reliable	+1 reliable
+1 willing to try new things	+1 willing to try new things
+1 good under pressure	+1 persistent, keep at it
+1 hands-on skills
+1 decisive
+1 confident
+1 can think and act quickly
+1 dedicated mother
+1 nurse/firefighter
+1 tolerant of family
+1 assertive
TOTAL = 11	TOTAL = 3

And actually, this is a generous score, because what I'm really doing is not only finding myself lacking in all the things I admire in my friend, but also assigning all the negative corresponding traits to myself. Thus, my naturally extroverted friend gets points for things like being able to think quickly, even though that's not necessarily a skill she worked for, while I beat myself up for being such a slow thinker. So my subconscious score really looks something more like this:

My friend	Me
+1 reliable	+1 reliable
+1 willing to try new things	+1 willing to try new things
+1 good under pressure	+1 persistent, keep at it
+1 hands-on skills	–1 inept
+1 decisive	–1 indecisive
+1 confident	–1 second-guessing
+1 can think and act quickly	–1 slow to think or act
+1 dedicated mother	–1 overwhelmed by the idea of a family
+1 nurse/firefighter	–1 largely useless
+1 tolerant of family	–1 intolerant of noise, commotion, and demands
+1 assertive	–1 non-assertive
TOTAL = 11	TOTAL = –5

Now, I'm not saying it's a good idea to compare yourself to others, but if you are going to, you should darn well use the same scoring method for both of you! I realized that I needed to give myself points for my innate—if less flashy—qualities, rather than just seeing my differences in a purely negative light.

I thought of a particular incident when this friend lost patience with my non-assertiveness in loading my horse. She was absolutely right that my problem in that instance was a lack of assertiveness, but that didn't, as I initially thought, negate all of my leadership skills.

Yes, I needed to be more assertive (a constant theme for me), but it wasn't just unwillingness to be assertive that caused me to back off. It was also because I was taking the long view of my relationship with my horse and putting that before the goal, and I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that it could be a confidence issue for him, and I was willing to be patient. I started to see that these are positive traits in me that, in the long term, stand me in good stead. 

That doesn't mean I don't have room to improve and become more balanced, but I'm not, as I initially thought, standing at the bottom of a mountain of achievement with no worthwhile skills. Rather, I have a different skill set and a different leadership style.

After that realization, I re-did my comparison, and here's what I came up with:

My friend	Me
+1 reliable	+1 reliable
+1 willing to try new things	+1 willing to try new things
+1 good under pressure	+1 persistent, keep at it
+1 hands-on skills	+1 conceptual / analytical skills
+1 decisive	+1 thorough / don’t rush to conclusions
+1 confident	+1 stick to my principles even when unsure
+1 can think and act quickly	+1 patient / wait to understand the bigger picture
+1 dedicated mother	+1 dedicated horse-woman
+1 nurse/firefighter	+1 teacher/trainer
+1 tolerant of family	+1 tolerant of living on my own
+1 assertive	+1 fair-minded / give the benefit of the doubt to others
TOTAL = 11	TOTAL = 11

Once I plotted this out, I realized that while I do admire assertive people who can act quickly, I also really appreciate people who, for instance, think generously of me and are patient with me, and by dint of that fact, I’ve found a new way to appreciate myself for those same tendencies. I've found, in other words, a positive self that I can love. 

I also began to realize that life choices don't make one person inferior to another. Take the example of living situations. I’ve always thought that anyone who lives with a family could probably just as easily live alone because, from my perspective, living alone is easy. Meanwhile, the thought of having a family is pretty intimidating to me, so I’m always impressed by people who go that route.

Yet the fact that I don’t choose to have a family doesn’t mean I couldn’t do it, any more than the fact that my friend doesn’t choose to live alone means that she can’t. It’s just a question of having different predilections, neither one inherently better than the other.

If this all sounds obvious, that’s good, because that’s the way it should be. Everyone should walk around realizing that they aren’t less than other people just because they have a different skill set. The trick is to know that AND to believe it. 

Happily, as I thought about my view of my horse, I realized that I'm not actually as hard on him as I am on myself. I do tend to be critical, but when I think about the things I love about him, it's his curiosity, his understated playfulness, and his confidence—all things that are innate in him, and that luckily I have not discounted just because of that fact. I have, however, recently been appreciating him and loving him more.

Don't make it personal.

This is what I've been telling myself for years, but without any perceptible change in my tendency to be reactive. Taking things personally is, I believe, the root of so much of our emotional baggage, and yet so few things actually are personal. But knowing that doesn't change your perception.

Lupin and I just got back from our first Parelli clinic since Colorado, and it was astoundingly refreshing. I forget, for one thing, how nice it is just to be around Parelli people, who are so calm about things that normal horse folk freak out about (like a horse left loose in the ring during a lesson). And then there's the delightful feeling of your brain really processing things as you hit one A-ha moment after another.

I had a lot of A-ha moments courtesy of Dan. Many of these are cumulative: you've heard it before, you've felt it in action, and yet it can be a long time before it clicks in your brain in a way that is habit-changing rather than just intellectually interesting.

In terms of taking things personally, I watched Dan give a private lesson where the horse was being super dominant. Dan showed the owner how to apply an action/consequence way of thinking to deal with the horse: the horse still gets to choose what to do, but certain choices have consequences. You're not punishing the horse, or forcing him to do something different; you're just showing him that sometimes he needs to make a better choice. So, for instance, rather than chasing the horse out of his space, Dan turned his back on the horse and gave a big yawn and a bigger stretch that just happened to land on the horse's mouth.

Oh. Look what might happen when you stand too close. Action, consequence.

The next morning, we were horse-shoed up, and Lupin was playing his usual game of creeping forward between me and whoever was talking. As I listened to Dan, part of my brain noticed how difficult it was for me to ask Lupin to back up, and I realized that's because I was thinking of being assertive with Lupin in personal terms: that he was challenging me, and doubting my leadership, and I had to prove it to him. Yes, that's probably what was going on, but for Lupin there's no emotion in that--it is truly just a game. For me it's an assault on my sense of myself. Sometimes that makes me angry ("How dare he!"), but more often it just makes me tired ("I can't believe I have to stand up for myself again.")

Note that just the physical action of backing Lupin up takes very little effort--in fact, I was sitting down, and all I had to do was lift my stick. It's the psychic energy of powering up for a perceived emotional confrontation that's draining.

Later, on board, I was asking Lupin to stay on the circle using John's method: if the horse comes off the circle, you get very buzzy--your energy comes up, you use your aids quickly and with a lot of noise--so that the horse wants to get back on the circle where you're calm and quiet. Lupin took this a little personally--or at least got impulsive. I just kept playing my game as he went up to a trot, then a canter, then finally back to down to a trot. But I noticed on one circle toward the end a slight hesitation: I waited longer than I should because I didn't want to apply the aid. Maybe it was because I wanted to believe he was with me, or because I was tired of being assertive, but there it was again: that emotional reluctance to be assertive.

It was a quick mental fix for me, though, when I thought about the action/consequence idea. You don't have to make being assertive a personal issue, and it doesn't have to cost you emotional energy. As soon as I started thinking just in terms of the actions, I had no problem: Lupin comes off the circle, I use my leg. There's no emotion there, whether it be hope for Lupin to do better, worry that I'm doing wrong, feeling inadequate because Lupin isn't with me. It's just an action and a consequence. The circle game was a good one for this because it is so clear and simple.

I'll be curious to see how this realization continues to work for me. I think a lot of the strength of it comes from the fact that it's hard to work off of negative stimuli ("don't make it personal") and much easier to change a habit when you have a positive model to substitute in place of your old mental habit (action/consequence rather than provocation/emotional reaction).

Thanks to Parelli, as always, for giving us so many new positive models.